(Con)Fused Furniture Design: Hybrid Historic+Modern Style

By Dornob Staff

Could two halves of one furniture design be crafted more differently? What starts as an ornate, highly-decorated antique-looking wooden dresser on one side transforms into the most abstract, minimalist and modern-looking of wood storage cabinets on the other.

In short, though both sides can be seen to belong to specific historic stylistic periods, there is a way in which they represent opposite aesthetics as different as postmodern paintings and ancient cave carvings – conceptually as far apart as art and/or design can get.

Despite the actual space of transition between the ancient- and ultramodern-looking pieces of this unlikely whole, there is something smooth about the transition – assisted by a few key points of physical overlap and the continuation of color from the hand-carved half to the through to parts of the machine-built half. Designed by Ferruccio Laviani for Emmemobili , the aptly named ‘Evolution’ oak sideboard may be the strangest attempt to fuse styles from separate centuries into a single, mass-produced and market-ready furniture object.